Street were believed to paint the iniquities of the merchants in glowing colours. In short the Colony of Hongkong earned in these early days the soubriquet, which it sustained for several decades later, of being both 'the land of libel and the haunt of fever.'
Such was the state of affairs when, to the astonishment of the colonists, Sir John Davis, the former successor of Lord Napier in the Superintendency of Trade, arrived with his suite in Hongkong (May 13, 1844) to relieve Sir H. Pottinger. The latter, it appeared, had been promised the next vacancy of the Governorship of the Presidency of Madras, which settlement, though nearer to the Equator, was then justly considered to be not by any means so hot a place for a British official as Hongkong had by this time become. Three years previous the editor of the Canton Register had assumed the role of the prophet and uttered the following diresome vaticination. 'Hongkong,' we read in the Canton Register of February 23, 1841, 'will be the resort and rendezvous of all the Chinese smugglers; opium smoking shops and gambling houses will soon spread; to those haunts will flock all the discontented and bad spirits of the Empire; the Island will be surrounded by floating Shameens (haunts of vice) and become a gehenna of the waters.' Such was the voice of Hongkong's Cassandra in 1841, and by the time that Sir H. Pottinger's administration closed, this prophecy seemed well nigh fulfilment. It may be doubted if Sir Henry returned to England in a much happier frame of mind than Captain Elliot whom he had superseded but hardly excelled.
When Sir H. Pottinger, after another visit to the Bogue for the vain purpose of patching up the Supplementary Treaty, left the Colony (June 12, 1844), the leading local newspaper, expressing the harsh views entertained at the time by the residents, spoke of him as a man 'who, with all his brilliant talents, appears either to have been utterly devoid of a sense of the moral obligations imposed upon him, his heart being perfectly seared to the impression of suffering humanity, or
